Lightning People (51 page)

Del didn't believe him. When Joseph told her the story of his family, going back four generations, she laughed hysterically. But laugher was only the smoke in the engine. When Joseph recited the list of names and dates that had once hung in his mother's study, when he did the addition to thirty-four, when he explained the same moment repeated in flawless symmetry, she jumped off the mattress in rage, kicking her foot against the bed to jolt Joseph's calm, lucid expression. She wanted to punch that expression right off his face.

Her mind raced with betrayal—a far worse betrayal than simple adultery. It was the betrayal of someone she loved telling her a ludicrous story to stop her from walking out on him.

“You're crazy,” she screamed. “Have you lost your mind? Listen to yourself. Your mother was insane, and that's what you inherited. Jesus, Joe, I wanted you to tell me anything. That you weren't in love with me. That we rushed into everything too quickly. Anything but this
bullshit
. My god, you really are sick.”

Del opened the closet to make a show of retrieving her suitcases. She splayed them out on the bedroom floor and began rifling through the dresser drawers before pausing as more anger found flint on her tongue. Suddenly every fallen promise—of him, of a green card, of remaining in New York on infinite autopilot—was striking the same loud chord.

“You people,” she yelled in disgust. “I'm so sick of everything about this country. You do whatever you want and then pretend you aren't accountable like everything is beyond your own control. Conspiracies,” she hissed. “You've invented this twisted idea in your head until you've made your body believe it. Well, guess what, that's not how life works. There's no destiny. You make your own or you die.”

“I'm just asking for you to listen,” he shouted while reaching out his hands.

Del felt the adrenaline of escaping, of leaving Joseph just as she had planned, of closing the door on him and running off.
We were an accident. Let's just chalk it up to that, and we'll be more careful next time.

“You think I wanted this?” he asked her, pleading as she tossed every article of clothing that she could find on the floor. “If I wanted this I would have stayed in Ohio. I thought I could get beyond it. I'm afraid.”

He was insane. He was an insane person manipulating facts in an attempt to keep her here against her will. She rounded on him, fingers slapping his face, her nails digging into his cheeks. She wrestled over him on the mattress and grabbed his chin so he'd be forced to submit to the spit flying from her lips. Her knees jabbed his legs, and her hair fell over his face.

“It's bullshit,” she screamed an inch from his eyes. “You should have warned me that I married a lunatic. You want me to believe some stupid prediction that even doctors can't find? You expect me to listen to any of this? You were right when you told me your mother was crazy. Fine, Joseph, if you really believe that, let yourself die. Why should I stop you? But don't expect me to wait around for it.”

“Why should you stop me?” he repeated in astonishment. “Why should you wait around?”

“You can't tell me this,” she whined. “It's not fair. Not now.”

He stared up at her, and a shiver ran through him like he suddenly realized that Del hadn't returned this morning for a reunion but for its opposite outcome. His eyes contracted. “But you're my wife,” he said, as tears lit the corners of his eyes.

“Joseph, come on,” she cried. “You know it hasn't been right for a while. Please understand.” She crawled onto her knees and placed her fingers on his arm. He yanked it back, and that same shiver tightened the muscles in his face, as if he was beginning to sense the kind of woman that kneeled in front of him on their bed.

“Forget it,” he said. “I didn't realize—I thought you'd listen and believe me.”

She shut her eyes to gather that last reserve of anger that would see her out of the apartment and in a cab across town, but suddenly that future was crowded out by the tiny bed, the two small bodies tossing
on top of it, and the two eyes tracking her as if she were a total stranger mistaken for someone else. Who that someone else was had become entirely clear to her. Joseph hadn't told her his family history to keep her from leaving, he had told her because he still believed that she was his wife. Del tried to recall the moment when they first met, to find the rips and flaws long overlooked that would have made this ending inevitable. He had given her a way out—if she had known this about his family, she wouldn't have married him. He had given her an opening. Leave now and take what you can from this wasted marriage. Run. She was free to hurry back to Raj, who would take her in his arms and they could live in the quiet of his studio and he would never ask her how she had managed to cut her ties with Joseph, knowing too well what indignities she had performed to bring such an ending into effect. She could be that person. She could desert her husband at his weakest moment and live with that memory until it no longer stung.

But Del was frozen on the single question Joseph now asked her. “Who are you?” he said like he still didn't know.

“Joe,” she replied quietly. “It's too much to ask.”

“You once told me you wanted to hear the worst, whatever it was. Well, now you have. Why did you ask me to marry you in the first place? Why did you bother?”

She remembered that night four months ago and wished she could forget it. That night she had felt her own future slipping from her grasp and had stared down at Joseph almost in tears. She had asked him to marry her, and he had said yes without a single untrusting beat. He had done that for her, saved her from her own life when she was certain there was so little left to save.

She bent over him on the mattress and pressed her cheek against his chest. Maybe it was her only way of saying good-bye to him. To hold him one more time.
Pity isn't love
, she told herself. But neither was selfishness. She felt the tremor of his heart against her cheek, the faint drum she had slept next to for the past ten months.

“I know it sounds crazy,” he whispered. “I want it to be crazy. I can't tell you how many times I tried to find the right words to explain it. I was so scared. I'm scared there's nothing I can do to
stop it from happening. Maybe it's nothing like you said. But either way, what am I supposed to do? I needed you to hear it. To help me maybe. I don't know.”

She tried to find the voice in her head, the one that said so confidently this morning that her own happiness was all that she owed herself. She tried to imagine Raj waving his arms for her across town. But the question returned:
Who are you?

She unclenched her muscles and let the air flow from her mouth. Joseph had only told her a story and asked her to listen. He stared down at her with his eyes narrowed, and she knew that he expected her to make good on her threat and leave. Yes, the ones who love you know exactly the kind of person you are. It's you who are constantly deceived.

She thought of Raj waiting in his apartment. She stared up at Joseph, so much older and more exhausted than he had looked when they first met. He was waiting for her too.

There was a sacrifice in every decision. Stay or go. Faith requires the sacrifice of a single leap. One day she would look back at this moment and she'd have to say,
I did this. Yes, that was me.

She pulled her hand from Joseph's grip and wiped her eyes. She lifted up and swung her feet to the floor. She tried not to think of the man she was losing. She reached over and pressed her fingers against Joseph's lips.

AT NIGHT JOSEPH dreamed of his mother.

He slept in his bedroom in the house in Ohio, his ceiling lit with green plastic stars and the snow beating against the curtained windows. There was a hole in the house somewhere, an opening that had come uncovered from the thick wool fabric that hung over every window. He heard her racing around the rooms, floor by floor, as she searched for the hole, because she must have felt it. He felt it too, a rogue current of air sweeping up the stairs and over his bed. His body shivered. Then his mother was sitting next to him on the side of his bed. She placed his father's teeth in his palm and cupped his fingers over them.

Every night now, Joseph dreamed of her, and every morning he woke to find Del next to him, pressing her palms against his forehead and running to fetch him a glass of water. She had stayed by his side, nursing him through his fever and forcing aspirin down his throat to control his temperature. He was so glad to find her there, kissing her palms with their glass-white scars and appreciating her yellowflecked eyes between long black lashes as she sopped a wet washcloth over his cheeks. At first he tried to tell her more about his family.
Now that the valve had been loosened, he had no end to the stories set to the backdrop of riverfront lawns and messy suburban houses. But Del shook her head. He had promised to let the past go, to stop willing the connections, to leave the dead where they were buried, and to concentrate on their life now.

Every morning, the sheets were soaked in sweat, but the pain in his chest was dissipating. His fingers and toes were numb, but his feet fit his shoes and he climbed from bed without feeling the churn of his stomach. He walked around the apartment forgetting about his body, leaving it for whole minutes and finding it later operating with no warning symptoms.
Maybe it is possible
, he thought,
that it was all just a trick of the brain
. Aleksandra had listened to the story of his family and had believed, and by doing so she had encouraged the sickness along. Del hadn't believed him. She told him outright that the past only mattered if he met it halfway. Maybe now he could bring his own mind to let it go. Joseph forced that point:
Nothing will happen. You're crazy to think so. Concentrate on what is.

Del seemed surprised by his slow resurrection, his Midwestern face rising out of its skeletal underpinnings and flying toward her with a drive that he hadn't possessed even in their first months as a couple. But it didn't surprise him. Joseph had sensed how close their marriage had come to its own fault line, and, even in her fitful silence as she spent hours staring out of the window, he pressed himself against her until she relented. She laughed as he slowly stripped her out of her clothes.

She said his attention to her was embarrassing. Yet Joseph couldn't resist following her as she shuffled around the apartment looking through old books on reptiles, searching for a reminder of her earlier interests. He clung to her so tightly that she employed a soft shove to push him back to bed. He didn't tell her that the bed frightened him. Lying down, he was too attuned to every beat in his blood and when he closed his eyes, they were there, his family, only seconds into unconsciousness, taped under his eyelids.

His agent, Janice, phoned with her battery of auditions, but Joseph didn't answer. He listened to her messages later, angrily optimistic, and then, when not hearing from him, just angry, threatening to
cut him from the agency if he didn't get back to work. And then he heard a voice he had almost forgotten, terrified and demanding, filled with a brutal history he no longer wished to revisit. “Joseph, I know I shouldn't bother you, but I need to see you,” Aleksandra said. “Please come. It's getting worse.” Joseph pressed delete and ran to his wife. She smoked a cigarette against the windowsill as dusk fell early. Summer was finally losing ground to autumn.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. He counted each day as if checking it off a list.

The afternoon Del went to Madi's apartment to settle her belongings, Joseph decided to take the opportunity to settle his own. He dug underneath the bed for the metal box wrapped in a towel. He brought it to the coffee table and opened the lid.

He cupped the .38 special in his fingers, a weightless piece of metal with its stainless steel barrel and black rubber handle. Five gold bullets were still stored in the chamber, never fired, never registered in the State of New York because he had bought it ten years ago in the back of a Harlem porn shop. Joseph stared at the weapon in his hand. He had expected for so many years that he might one day use it, the muzzle against his temple with his finger over the trigger, the pain in his chest too unbearable to see beyond it. He imagined what his eyes would look like in that moment, streaked glass windows with no emergency exits. It seemed impossible to him now to think of killing himself.

Joseph needed to get rid of it, wrap it in a towel, and toss it into the East River. He placed the gun back in its container and grabbed the small blue ring box that was also stored there. Inside were his father's teeth, two incisors and a canine strapped to a wire. The teeth were cold, smooth, and yellowed, and they used to fit on the gums of a man who had no idea what his heart had in store for him, digging his own backyard ditch deeper and deeper, year by year. His father had been luckier for not knowing. He could face his mornings without any narrowing of the horizon over their backyard hill. Joseph placed the teeth on their cotton pillow and closed the lid. He heard Del's key turn in the door and rushed into the bedroom, wedging the box between the mattress and spring.

He had slept for too long over a gun and a set of teeth. How could he have ever lived in the present with those two items—one from the past, the other bent on the future—always within arm's reach? We don't have to become the people we've imagined for ourselves, he thought, those strange versions invented so young and held on to far past their expiration date. He could start over now as his own man. Del had promised to stay with him if he agreed to believe that.

As he ran into the hallway, he made a calculation by habit that he knew he should break. Perhaps it would go with the residue of his fever. He counted eight days into three-hundred-and-sixty five, the stretch of time until he'd be free of thirty-four.